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PACIFIC-12 CONFERENCE WOMEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 6, 2014Linda LappeBrittany WilsonAshley WilsonSEATTLE, WASHINGTON Colorado – 76 THE MODERATOR: Welcome and congratulations to Colorado. Coach Linda Lappe, Brittany Wilson and Ashley Wilson. Coach, I'll have you open and we'll take questions. COACH LAPPE: Really excited for our team. Any time you can win a game in postseason, it's a plus. We're not ready to be done playing yet, and I think you can see how much intensity we played in the second half that we want to keep playing. Just excited for our entire team. I thought everybody that came in and everybody on the bench was fantastic. Everybody did their job. Everybody knew their role. When we played together in that game, we were fantastic. When we moved the ball, when we played together defensively, hit the open player, and then we knocked down those open shots and everything seemed to go our way. So, happy for where we are, and now we'll celebrate very quickly and then move on to the next game. Q. Brittany, you knocked down some three‑pointers tonight, some big ones at timely moments. What got into you guys behind the arc tonight? It seemed like it was a better game shooting. BRITTANY WILSON: Me and Coach watched film before we left, and one thing that she noticed about my shots was I was hitting the ball out of them. And she said there is no reason I should be doing that on the three, and just stay in my shot, and that's exactly what I did and they fell. Q. Coach, to me the pivotal moment in the game early in the second half, you were down 46‑38, and they run off ten straight points essentially. What changed at that time? COACH LAPPE: Just our aggressiveness. I thought the way we scored quickly in transition. Ashley was a huge part of that in running the floor. Point guards did a nice job in hitting her ahead. She did a nice job of finishing some tough shots down there. So really some quick scores. To go on runs, it's all about putting consecutive possessions together, getting a score and making a great defensive play getting the rebound and getting the stop. So the game is pretty simple when you make it simple. We took what the defense gave to us. We changed a little bit how we were thinking, I thought, at the beginning of the second half we were playing one‑on‑one way too much. That's not our team. We play our best basketball when we play together. We need each other to defend, and we kind of flipped that switch at that point in time and really relied on each other and helped each other out both on the offensive end and defensive end. Q. Brittany or Ashley, both teams have had some hard luck with injuries this year. What is it about your group that you guys didn't want to go home and you wanted to keep this going? ASHLEY WILSON: With any team, adversity is going to come. So it's just about how you respond to adversity and how tough you're willing to be and how much you're willing to bounce back. We've done that all year long, no matter injuries or whatever. No team is going to feel sorry for you because you have injuries. You have to suit up and be ready to go the next day. BRITTANY WILSON: I would agree. We have to play our best ball because it's either win or go home. It brings out the great in our team. We have 13 players that are going to fight. Especially when one is down, we fight even harder. With the loss of Jas and when I was out, regardless who it is, we fight. We'll continue to fight whether we have five. We're still going to fight and punch just as hard as anybody else. Q. Can you talk about Fields? Wanted to win pretty bad, but them being shorthanded, did they kind of run out of gas? COACH LAPPE: Yeah, you've got to give UCLA a lot of credit. Fields is a fantastic player, and she's tough to guard. She can score in so many different ways. She gets to the rim. She's strong, she can shoot the threes. I felt like we just kept at it, and we kept wearing her down. She got some easy shots early, but we made her work for most of her shots, and you can see that maybe towards the end of the game with some of her shots falling short. So, yeah, I felt like we did a nice job of wearing them down. I thought there was a segment in the second half where both teams were a little gassed, and I liked our toughness. That's where all the games earlier in the season and our ability to bounce back from adversity, our ability to lose close games and keep fighting and not give up, you can see that sort of mentality at that point in time where either team really could have broken and I liked how we had that resolve, and we had that resiliency and kept coming at them. It wasn't an easy win. UCLA, they do a lot with their players and who they have and with the injuries that they've had. I thought we just kept at it, and kept a little bit longer than they did and we were able to close it out. Q. It seemed you really disrupted them defensively. Did you change anything or do anything different? COACH LAPPE: Yeah, we did. They were really comfortable to start the second half. Everybody was making shots, even players that don't normally make shots. You could just see them start to get comfortable in what they were doing. I always think your defense has a huge part in that, and we wanted to try to make them uncomfortable, so we started to trap a little bit and tried to speed them up and make them do things they weren't as comfortable doing, making them pass to players, making them pass overhand, and just increasing our aggressiveness. Our players did a nice job of really just bearing down and getting loose balls and getting tips. I thought the fact that we turned them over in the second half quite a bit really helped us be able to get our offense going. We're our best when we can get out and transition. Q. You just played UCLA at the end of February. Did you make any adjustments this time around? COACH LAPPE: We ran the trap a little bit more than we did at their place. Other than that, no, not much. They had Lemberger when they played at our place so it was a little bit different defensively. Offensively we ran a little bit more kind of our basic offense versus the two‑three. We didn't run quite as many on‑ball threes this time around. I think the biggest difference was our guards were ready to score tonight. Our guards were not ready to score the last time we played them. When you're a coach, you always try to figure out what the other coach is going to try to do, and I thought they'd try to really pack it in on us and make them hit outside shots. You could see how hard it was for our posts to throw the ball, especially without Jen in there. We needed our guards to step up and take shots they take every day in practice, and take shots they make every day in practice, and I felt like they did a nice job. Brittany did a nice job. Ashley hitting an open three. Huggins coming in and giving us key minutes as well. I thought that was probably the biggest thing. Q. Ashley and Brittany, are you guys looking forward to the challenge of facing Stanford tomorrow night? BRITTANY WILSON: Yes, I think we're ready for them. Like you said, it's win or go home. So you lay it all on the floor, and we're ready. We don't look at the name on the jersey. We all have to come out and play 40 minutes. In the end, it's about who plays 40 minutes the best. ASHLEY WILSON: We're ready. 40 minutes of absolute great defense. Same thing we've been doing all year long. So try to do the best we can with Chiney. They shoot the three really well, so try to contest outside. Just play good as a unit, which is what we've been doing all year. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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